(1) Field of the Invention
The invention pertains generally to automatically determining client device location within a hospitality establishment. More specifically, the invention relates to mapping source access-nodes of a computer network at a hospitality establishment to known locations within the hospitality establishment in order to thereafter automatically detect a location of a client device.
(2) Description of the Related Art
Hospitality establishments such as hotels and resorts often provide high speed Internet access (HSIA) in guest rooms. Room detection functionality allows the HSIA system to automatically detect from which guest room a particular user device is accessing the hotel's computer network in order to automatically bill the corresponding room folio for Internet access. In this way, a guest staying in a particular room can connect a user device to a network access port in the particular room and any associated fees for Internet access are directly and automatically charged to the detected guest room.
An example of an HSIA solution employed in the hospitality industry is the One View Internet™ (OVI) system by Guest Tek Interactive Entertainment Ltd. With the OVI system, when a user device is attached to the hotel's local area network (LAN), a dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) server on the LAN assigns a dynamic Internet Protocol (IP) address to the device. In order to detect in which room the user device is located, the OVI system receives a packet specifying the user device's assigned IP address and looks up the user device's media access control (MAC) address from an address resolution protocol (ARP) table. The OVI system then queries a core switch utilizing simple network management protocol (SNMP) to determine which port of the core switch is associated with the MAC address of the user device.
According to a predetermined network map that describes how all the ports of the various switches in the hotel's computer network are connected, the OVI system then determines that the detected port of the core switch either leads to a specific guest room (the room detection process is finished at this point), or that the port leads to another switch. In the case that the port is connected to another switch, the OVI system repeats the process by querying the other switch to find out the port of that switch that is associated with the MAC address of the user device. The process continues until a source switch port associated with MAC address is specified in the network map as being connected to a specific guest room. The OVI system thereby follows the MAC address of the client device by traversing switches of the hotel's computer network to find associated source port(s) until the network map indicates that a final source port leads to a specific guest room.
However, a drawback of the above approach is that the process is dependent upon an accurate network map indicating the path from each guest room through the various switches. The original installers of the hotel's computer network must carefully document the switch/port connections as the network is built and manually input this information into a mapping database. Manually creating a network map in this manner is time consuming and error prone. Additionally, if the network layout later changes, such as may occur during an adjustment to the hotel's computer network after installation, the old network map may no longer be valid and automatic room detection may thereafter fail to work properly. In this situation, network support staff must be called in to fix the network map, which again requires time consuming and error prone manual inspection of switch port cable wiring and entry of corresponding information into a new mapping database.